Spring is a weird time for movies. I mean, usually not for me, because it’s often full of horror options, but it feels like there are fewer this year than usual, and thusly I join the ranks of people for whom spring is a weird time for movies. Or I could get off my ass and start catching up on the horror movies that are available to me, but I’m getting way the hell off topic here. What I’m actually trying to say is, there are all kinds of movies that I sort of want to see, enough to keep me going twice a week for probably the next month solid. But there are practically no movies that I want to see so badly that I can immediately point at the listing and say, “That’s the one, no question, how are we not already eating popcorn?!” I suppose this also happens a little bit in the fall, but by then I’m so glutted on summer fare that I barely notice.

This is the exact situation that occurred on Monday, after having dismissed the pointlessly bad movies about high school kids using underground mixed martial arts competitions as a metaphor for growing up and the flooded with Spring-Breakers kid flicks. The remaining options were Vantage Point, wherein a lot of people witness and try to unravel a Presidential assassination, and Doomsday, wherein a semi-recognizable actress faces off against post-apocalyptic Scotland. I wanted to see both in a vague sort of way without expecting awesome out of either of them, but we ended up going with Doomsday because it was showing earlier, and also because there’s clearly something about post-apocalyptica that revs my engine.

Apparently, sometime later this year a flesh-ravaging deadly virus breaks out in Edinburgh, say, and England walls off Scotland to contain it. Then thirty years pass. Now the virus has resurfaced in London, and tough-as-nails hot chick Rhona Mitra is sent behind the wall with a small military team on a suicide mission to recover a cure that has only been speculated to exist. What follows is an adrenaline-filled hodge-podge of politics, cannibalism, pole-dancing, gladiatorial combat, piercings, and car chases populated by every single person that’s seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and really wished they’d been old enough to be an extra when it came out. And if the Road Warrior motif doesn’t float your boat, things change directions in an equally awesome way about two-thirds of the way in. All this, plus gory sensibilities and a slick, dark sense of humor surprised me out of my former blasé attitude into having genuine fun at every turn. If the summer were not exclusively reserved for sequels these days, Doomsday would have been a perfect July action flick, and you should consider it an early treat for 2008’s season.